


For All That We Are

by MoreHuman



Series: It’s What We Deserve [1]
Category: Schitt's Creek, Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 09:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21296990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoreHuman/pseuds/MoreHuman
Summary: Because it’s clear David Rose’s husband doesn’t just love him. Heappreciateshim. He appreciates him so much it seeps from his pores, evaporates off his skin, becomes airborne. It’s contagious. Logan’s getting a David Rose Appreciation contact high, and he doesn’t like it.
Relationships: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: It’s What We Deserve [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1554928
Comments: 47
Kudos: 177
Collections: Broken Bestiary





	For All That We Are

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for mentions of past violence, suicide, and drug use. Nothing that isn’t in VM canon, but if you’re coming from the gentler SC universe, I wanted you to be warned.
> 
> Also, I feel like this goes without saying for these two properties, but: timelines, schmimelines.

On his way down the courthouse steps, marriage license in hand, Logan recognizes a pair of eyebrows. It’s literally only the eyebrows he recognizes, because he can’t remember ever seeing the face beneath them smile before. Not like this.

“David Rose,” he blurts out before he can stop himself. What’s he doing? He doesn’t want to talk to David Rose. He doesn’t want David Rose to turn toward the sound of his name, to look right at him and—

“Oh my God!” David exclaims, and yes, that’s the expression Logan remembers. All disgust and unease, like if indigestion had eyebrows. 

“Well, I guess the next, _ unplanned _stop on our little tour is,” David breathes around his name like it’s a bone caught in his throat, “Logan Echolls.”

At first Logan thinks he’s talking to himself, but then he notices David’s pawing at the arm of the man next to him. Logan assumed he was a stranger, just another passerby on his way into the courthouse, because he doesn’t look at all like the type of person David Rose would be pawing at. He looks... normal.

“Tour?” Logan asks, and goddamn why can’t his mouth ever just stay shut.

“Yes, my husband is forcing me to bring him to scenes of my youthful embarrassments as a spring breaker here in,” another name that seems to cause him physical pain to say, “Neptune.”

“He lost a bet,” the husband adds, as if that explains anything. Logan still can’t get over how normal this guy looks. Too normal to even be an extra in the made for TV movie about the Rose family. Not that Logan ever watched that. He’d just been too lazy to change the channel that one day.

“Uh huh. Well,” Logan says, pulling back his sleeve to check the time on a nonexistent watch. “You must have started _ very _early in the morning to have made it to me already.” 

“We’ve actually only made it to the second time I had to pick up a date from their arraignment hearing.” David starts pushing his husband in the direction of the door. “So if you’ll excuse us…”

“Sorry,” Normal Husband says, his voice is light, his feet planted with a surprising amount of strength, “how exactly do you know David?”

“Okay, no, this is not supposed to be an _ interactive _ tour.” David gives up on the pushing. When he brings his hands up to cover his face, he’s wearing an unnecessary number of rings.

Logan observes them a moment, taking in David’s squirming agony and Normal Husband’s assured amusement. He has his back to David, but clearly knows exactly what buttons he’s pushing. Logan still doesn’t want to talk to David Rose, but he decides he can spare a few moments to fuck with David Rose.

“He dated my sister Trina for a hot minute years and years ago.” 

He stops himself from saying exactly how many years ago, but he could. It’s the same number of years since he last felt low enough to hang with Trina’s crowd, since he last called Dick at 4 AM because he was too wasted to get home on his own, since he last stood on the railing of the Coronado Bridge. Those are all anniversaries he counts.

“Um, it was more like a very cold minute?” David corrects, placing his hands on his husband’s shoulders. Not to push, this time. Just to be there. “Once she realized I didn’t spend enough time with my sister for her to be featured on _ A Little Bit Alexis_, she gave me this big speech about ‘her needs’ and stormed out of Chateau Marmont in the middle of appetizers.”

“Staging dramatic exits always was her favorite hobby,” Logan admits.

“But honestly I considered it a win because we’d already ordered and I got to take her entree home.”

Normal Husband whips his head around and squints hard. “Are we sure that’s how that went down, David?” 

“Okay, I ate it there at the table.” This only makes the husband squint harder. David angles his face up at the sky as if praying for a lightning bolt to appear out of the California sunshine and strike him dead. “And said she was in the bathroom so I could order double dessert.”

“There it is.” Normal Husband brings his hands up to angle David’s heavenward gaze back down to earth and kisses his cheek softly. His fingers smooth down the length of one of David’s sweater sleeves, and there’s a smile behind his voice that doesn’t show on his face. “Don’t worry, I’ll never to leave you at Chateau Marmont. We can’t afford it.”

Logan realizes, with a prickle of annoyance, that he likes this person. He’s been in his presence all of five seconds, he looks like Doogie Howser, C.P.A., he’s married to David Rose, and Logan _ likes _ him. Gross.

“How is Alexis?” Logan asks, trying not to sound like now he wants to keep talking.

David glares at him. “She still hasn’t forgotten that time you stood her up at a rave in Joshua Tree, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Tell her she dodged a bullet,” Logan says. He catches Normal Husband doing a quick down-up-down in his peripheral vision. He’s being polite about it, but Logan’s spent too many years in this military-issue body not to feel it when he’s being checked out. And it’s not like he doesn’t know what this wedding suit does for him.

_ Yes, _ he wants to say, _ imagine this, but freshly dropped out of college at age twenty, buried under about a mile of substances, and desperately in love with someone else. _

“The last time I saw Logan,” David says, looking delighted to remember he’s not the only one here who was once a pathetic mess, “he was passed out across the toilet at one of Connor Larkin’s house parties. Which was a big problem, because I’d just flounced in there after finding Trina making out with The Situation, and then I had to backtrack like an idiot and everyone saw.”

A flare of heat fills Logan’s chest and he latches onto whatever thoughts he can to keep from feeding it, just like Jane taught him. Did Trina really ever make out with The Situation? Why would The Situation have been invited to Connor’s? Was _ Jersey Shore _ even a thing by then?

“I’m so sorry,” he says once he’s sure he can keep his tone ironic, removed, “that my downward spiral forced everyone’s eyes to be on you. I know how much you always hated attention. I’m shocked that of the two of us, you weren’t the one to run away from his past and into the Navy.”

Normal Husband makes a noise that can only be described as a cackle. He claps a hand over his mouth, but his expression is not one of regret. “Sorry, but can we all just take a minute to picture that? Like… _ really _ picture it?” He stares off into the middle distance with a look of wonder that’s either genuine or put on, Logan can’t tell. “It’s like the armed forces equivalent of those people who really, really shouldn’t be auditioning for _ American Idol_.”

Logan cracks a smile and his chest feels cool, extinguished. This guy is so likable that Logan can stop thinking about The Situation. Maybe he’s not as normal as he looks.

“Okay, first of all,” David says, rotating his wrists and elbows, clearly winding up for something, “I would rock the _ hell _out of those high-contrast uniforms. With proper tailoring of course, because yuck.”

“Of course,” his husband chimes in without breaking David’s rhythm, a practiced hype man.

“Second of all, I never would have run away from my past. I thought I deserved it. And I didn’t, so it’s a good thing I was ejected from it by force.”

Logan expects the husband to interject here too, but instead he just gazes at David with an expression so soft and intimate that Logan has to look away.

“Third of all, did you actually run away from your past, Logan? What are you still doing here in the place where… in the place where…” David’s hands are rotating fully from the shoulder now, but they don’t seem to be churning up any more words.

Logan decides to fill in the blanks for him. There’s no way David knows the half of it. “Here in the place where my father murdered my high school girlfriend and got away with it? Where my mother jumped off a bridge? Where I’ve been arrested a handful of times, mostly for murders I didn’t commit? Where everyone knows me as the tragic fuckup I used to be? Where everyone I ever loved left me in some way or another?” He pauses, but clearly neither of them are going to say anything because Jesus, how could they. “I don’t know, I guess I feel like I deserve it. To stay.”

“Um,” David says. “Well. That got very dark.”

“Yeah,” Logan agrees. “Anyway, let me know if you need the name of a good therapist while you’re in town.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure your therapist is overqualified for David,” Not So Normal Husband says. “And believe me, that’s saying something.”

This guy is magic. He’s just told them both they have massive issues, but shot through with such fondness that it feels like a compliment, like an achievement worth celebrating. Is this something all well adjusted people can do? Wade right into other people’s trauma and know exactly where to put their feet? Logan wouldn’t know. He’s never wanted to be around a well adjusted person before now.

David flutters a hand in the direction of his husband. “Don’t mind him, he had a happy childhood.”

The husband grabs the fluttering hand and presses a kiss to the back of it. “Yeah, David prefers I don’t mention that in mixed company.”

Logan knows this kind of banter. It’s not just about getting your partner to laugh. It’s about showing your partner what you see, what you know, that you’re there. It’s an act of devotion. He’s just never seen it like this, from the outside. He hopes he and Veronica aren’t this obvious about it, and then he hopes that they are.

Because it’s clear David Rose’s husband doesn’t just love him. He _ appreciates _ him. He appreciates him so much it seeps from his pores, evaporates off his skin, becomes airborne. It’s contagious. Logan’s getting a David Rose Appreciation contact high, and he doesn’t like it.

Maybe that’s what makes him see it. Logan Echolls and David Rose, two sides of the same funhouse mirror. Two entitled rich boys who grew up pampered and neglected and so, so alone. Who kept a quip and an overwrought hand gesture at the ready to cover the depths of their self loathing. Who destroyed themselves because it was the only behavior they could ever learn. Logan became addicted to anger because if he felt angry he didn’t have to feel anything else. He wonders what emotion David is addicted to. What he made himself feel for so long that he couldn’t feel anything else. Anxiety? Shame? Humiliation? It had taken rock bottom, and years of work, and a ten million-dollar investment from the U.S. government for Logan to make himself worthy of his own happiness.

_ What have you done, David? _ he wonders, watching this person he loathes lean back into his husband’s arms and smile. _ How did you make yourself worthy? _

The moment doesn’t last. David scowls suddenly and pulls his phone from a pocket somewhere deep within his—is that a skirt? 

“Fuck!” The word is out of David’s mouth before he even has the screen unlocked. “The retailer is trying to change the terms _ again_. These SoCal flakes. This is exactly why I wanted to expand our brand to stores in New York, but fucking _ Sebastien_—”

David starts wandering away, punching his thumbs against his phone screen, and almost collides with a pack of drunk college kids stumbling down the steps. Probably coming from someone’s arraignment hearing.

“Excuse me!” he shrieks after them, gesturing in particular at a bro in a Hearst football jersey. “Just so you know, wearing a sports blouse when not performing in a sport is incorrect!” 

Then David presses his phone to his ear, still walking away from them with extreme purpose, and disappears into a conversation Logan can’t hear.

“He makes friends wherever he goes,” the husband says, seeming not at all surprised that David’s just abandoned him with a stranger.

Logan has to laugh. “I’ve said the same thing about my,” he makes a small wave with the document in his hand, elides the formalities, “wife.”

“I’ll never tell him this,” he says, looking sideways at Logan, a conspirator's gaze, “but it’s so rewarding to be loved by someone who hates everyone.”

Logan remembers how the thought _ Veronica Mars loved me once _ used to be a ladder that could pull him out of anyplace deep and dark. He used to repeat it to himself like a mantra, but it wasn’t until he learned to pull himself out on his own that he stopped falling back in. When he didn’t need the ladder anymore, the thought became a roof, keeping out the weather. _ Veronica Mars loved me; she loves me; she still loves me_.

_ Veronica Mars is marrying me today_, he almost says out loud, as if that name will mean anything to this person. He wishes it would, because it’s the only way to explain that he’s proud. He’s so proud of himself, and he has hardly anyone to tell. _ I’m going to be a badass detective’s husband_.

Logan wonders how it would feel to have someone like this he could tell. If someone who exudes safety and steadiness and normalcy could understand how proud he is. The steadiest people in his life are people he’s flown into war zones with or pulled from a car wreck just before certain death. Danger and pain are the glue that holds everyone he cares about close to him.

He knows Veronica needs this kind of person. He’s been trying to be this kind of person for her, but it’s so hard. He’s angry all the time and she’s scared all the time—scared of nothing so much as admitting she’s scared. She needs to be perfect for everyone, so she shuts everyone out. He and Wallace have talked about this, but only a little. He’s never shared danger or pain with Wallace.

Logan panics because there’s a question in his throat and _ How did you get like this? _ isn’t something you can just ask someone. He tries to save it.

“How did you get—David?” He clears his throat, tries again. “I mean, where did you come from—where are you from?”

David Rose’s husband looks at him for a long moment, as if somehow sensing there’s more behind this mangled question. Logan needs to get out of here. 

“A town called Schitt’s Creek.” He shrugs apologetically, as if he’d chosen the name. “I’m Patrick, by the way. Sorry, my husband slept in the day they covered introductions in finishing school.”

“Patrick,” Logan says, starting down the steps toward the rest of his life, leaving this person he likes out of it. “Get the hell out of this place before it eats you alive.”


End file.
